Beautiful fictions

Maybe I’m a pessimist, or maybe it’s because it’s February and there is a constant grey drizzle with the occasional excitement of something between sleet and rain - no, now it really is raining, fine grey rain - but it seems that we are on the brink of a new Dark Ages, like the time in Europe when Popes and Priests and Bishops and Kings controlled what we thought and how we thought it; the time when Gallileo was shown the instruments of torture to encourage him to retract his statement that moons circled Jupiter, you could see them through this here telescope; and therefore the anomaly of planets being embedded in crystal spheres had to be addressed. Now we who share a culture that has evolved through the Enlightenment will have to explain to ourselves what has happened - which is that a way towards an understanding of the world and the universe based on the evidence of our senses, which are the only pathways between the universe and the brain, Galileo's way; working together with a tradition of conceptualisation which I’m not sure that we have a good name for, but can be pedestrianly labelled with the philosopher’s “what is the case”; that kind of understanding based on evidence is being rejected, by politicians as well as popes, in favour of a way of understanding based on stories, beautiful but fictional stories, made up by men, always men, from far away and long ago.
Evidence. It’s such a boring, dusty word. It is however crucial, a fulcrum for how we think and therefore what we do.
By and large we human beings operate on two levels as to evidence. We ignore it in our account of ourselves, our significance, our stories, our creations, our bigotries and chauvinisms and loves. But we take very careful notice of it, hopefully, when standing on the edge of a cliff or changing lanes at 150 kph on the motorway.
And there is absolutely no evidence for the existence of God, gods, fairies, ghosts, the soul, life after death, alchemy, or double decker buses on the moon.
There is a mystery about where everything came from. It is the mystery of existence. But once you have accepted that something, anything, exists, then the problem is in theory soluble - not necessarily by us, maybe our brains aren’t right for it, but given our record so far, progress in that direction seems likely.
The mystery of existence is conceptually difficult. It’s opposite, a thought experiment, that nothing exists, nothing has ever existed, is just as inconceivable as the supposition that something exists and maybe, in some sense, has always existed. But once you accept that something exists - quantum foam or space-time or p-branes or a naked singularity - and you wonder how it came about, where whatever existed first came from; then positing God, or gods, does absolutely nothing for that ultimate mystery. It merely defers the question with a fiction, God, evolved by the human brain over historical epochs that we can trace. God does not answer the question, it merely adds a redundant term. There is evidence for quantum foam - according to the cover of the New Scientist I saw in WH Smith’s yesterday there is palpable evidence. But there is no evidence for God, or fairies, as independent and discrete anythings that are sensate and aware of their own existence.
Evidence. The millions upon millions of the superstitious, those who base their understanding of the world finally on the beautiful, primitive fictions of men, as if the aesthetics and politics and dietary laws of a wondering West Asian tribe was the only portal to all truth; all those Jews and Christians and Muslims with their wars and murder and torture, their misogyny and genocide, along with the Nazis and the Stalinists, all whose access to truth is through a [sometimes beautiful, sometimes hideous] fiction; all of them reject evidence. There is no evidence, they say, for evolution. God did indeed create the world in six days.
Evidence next. But I must go and change the brake pads on my mountain bike, the rear ones are through to the rivets and making a mess of the discs, as well as not actually doing any braking. All palpable, evidential stuff.
And scaring yourself [with me this is easily done] by hurtling [in my case not much of a hurtle] downhill through mud and over rocks is as good a way of staying sane as any. (More....)